MoEML Gazetteer of Early Modern London

"The MoEML Gazetteer of Early Modern London is a descriptive gazetteer in that each place is linked to an Encyclopedia page with a 'thick description' of place. (...) Until now, there has been no digital gazetteer and authority list for placenames in early modern London. Our gazetteer offers a standard for placenames ca. 1550-1650.1 Such a standard enables interoperability across digital projects that include early modern London placenames. Shakeosphere and DEEP have already used our gazetteer to identify toponyms in their data and link to MoEML. We hope that other scholars, editors, and researchers will adopt these authority names in secondary criticism, in modernized editions of early texts, and in datasets that include a geographic component. The gazetteer also allows us to aggregate many variant names that have been given to a place. We define place as a space that has been made meaningful by human activity or observation. The existence of a toponym is one sign that space has become place. Furthermore, toponyms often preserve a memory of why a place is significant. Thus, toponyms are intrinsically interesting to scholars of language, history, and onomastics (the study of the origin of proper names)."